


Countless Stars, Light on Me

by ka_tsu_ra



Category: Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger, Super Sentai Series
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, sad coming of age stories in space
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-21
Updated: 2015-06-21
Packaged: 2018-04-05 11:47:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4178652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ka_tsu_ra/pseuds/ka_tsu_ra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of the betrayal, Marvelous has to face being alone again. He's not captain, not GokaiRed, not anything. But he has no other choice.<br/>Note: If you clicked before, and this didn't look finished: Power outage wiped half of it. Sorry! All fixed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Countless Stars, Light on Me

**Author's Note:**

  * For [labicheramure](https://archiveofourown.org/users/labicheramure/gifts).



Marvelous didn't cry that first lonely night aboard the Galleon. He didn't do much reacting of any kind; there was too much to be done and more that he'd failed to do.

The attack had grounded her, first off. He could only hope that it was chiefly mechanical work he could puzzle out on his own. The bird was only so much help. She was less help when it came to the most immediate task. He'd chased her out the first time his hand slipped holding the pinchy-grabby things – forceps, his brain would provide much later – from the medical kit.

Getting the round out was fumbling, painful work that he did on the floor with his back braced against a bulkhead and his shirt pooled under him to catch the blood. It was near dark, just the console lights and the emergency lighting along the edges of the floor and the distant fires outside. His hands shook with an unconquerable tremor. Once it – and the stray fibers from his shirt – were free, Marvelous slumped and let himself bleed for a while. His eyes stung. He hurt, so of course they did. The gloss over them softened the half-dark room around him, disguised the blast marks and bullet holes and general disarray.

He sucked in a breath.

It wasn't fair. Strange, to find himself thinking that. He could have laughed. He'd abandoned the idea of fairness, the prospect of constancy, a long time ago. At least, he'd told himself that. The others – of which there were none, now – had allowed him to backslide into naivete. Even when the rotating roster of crew came and went, the central members remained. Himself, AkaRed, the bird, the scheming dog who seized on that recovering naivete to infiltrate the ship and put a shot in him like it was nothing.

Marvelous pounded a fist backward into the bulkhead and cried out wordlessly. The sound and the sharp intake of breath that followed rang through the room and down the corridors. He'd instinctively struck out with his dominant arm, the one he'd just sunk a quarter hour into repairing. For a split second, it hurt worse than anything and he wanted to die. Then it was gone, died down to an ache that ebbed with the beat of his heart. He wasn't bleeding much, luckily. So, so damn luckily. He'd hate to come this far to bleed out in the dark.

He had a promise to keep, after all, and the dead can't fulfill those.

He cleaned and covered the wound before he forced himself to stand. He'd have to do it over before long, when his hands stilled, but it would do the job while he got the ship aloft again.

He heard the telltale mechanical sounds of Navi lurking in the corridor down to the engine room before he saw her. It was a welcome sound; any sound was. He'd been alone for so long before. When had he learned to hate silence?

“Hey, bird.”

She peered out from behind a corner up ahead and swept her bright eyes in Marvelous' direction. The light, too, was welcome.

“Marvelous.” He thought he read pity in her tinny voice, and he was too tired to refute it.

Who wouldn't pity a cabin boy with no captain, alive on account of a missed shot and a life traded for his own, wandering a grounded ship alone?

“Come on.” He sped up to round the corner and precede her to the engine room. His motions were stiff and snappy. It was the best he could do to keep from collapsing. “You gotta be my user's manual for a while.”

Navi came to light on his shoulder – the good one. “But-”

He swatted at her. “Just follow me and be a flashlight and tell me what to do.”

“Oh, I don't know if I can even do that!” She circled his head, throwing the dull yellow beams from her eyes all over the machinery. “I'm not a user's manual! There's not a lot I can do without-”

“Me neither, but we don't have a choice.”

“Right.”

It didn't take long. At least, in his smeared perception of time it didn't take long. It was done, that was enough. Time wasn't a factor. There would be no grand chase in pursuit of revenge. Time lost in the ambush and the implicit promise to keep himself alive prevented that. As long as it got done, however fast it got done, that was enough.

The computer systems were still intact, somehow. Marvelous wasn't prepared to deal with those, that was- That was somebody else's job he hadn't had a chance to learn. He could lift his hands to the simple mechanical tasks, make his screaming body a machine for the time being, until all was done and he could let the dregs of his adrenaline run out. He crumpled onto the grating, his bare back against the warm bulkhead. He was hurt, deeply and probably not as sterile as he ought to be. To be warm would be good. The thrum of the engines worked through him like a heartbeat. He closed his eyes.

He slept through the last hours of night, through the next day. The lights were up when he came around. He sat up, felt his arm for swelling or telltale hotness out of well-worn habit, and let himself feel relief when he found it lax and no warmer than the rest of him. He moved, rose. The warmth and the sleep had taken the stiffness out of him, but the adrenaline lurch made it hard to stay upright.

It didn't matter.

Mercifully, full power hadn't been diverted to the lights in the common room. It was still half-dark, still obscured, still nearly as it was 24 hours before. Good. He didn't need the distraction, passing it on his way to the bridge. Navi met him halfway there, but neither said anything.

He'd never done this before, not alone. The whole process, taking the necessary place, grasping the wheel, entering the commands he knew only from observation, felt unreal. Like his hands would simply pass through the console. Like he'd start to float away, very high up, then come crashing down only to wake again in his bunk with everything how it should-

How it was.

This process, too, took just long enough. He knew the commands and the Galleon didn't care the way he did if he fit in the chair or if his hands felt wrong on the wheel. He slunk out once he'd set a course and got her free of the planet's pull, back to the common room. Navi didn't follow.

It was still dark. He made his way to one of the portholes and watched the planet and its tiny moon recede. His breath made frost on the glass. The heat pumps would offset the chill soon enough; there just hadn't been a good reason to run them on the ground with the world burning down around her.

No, not the world. Just a tiny fraction of it, a fraction so distant that he couldn't discern it from the rest of the planet's surface.

Soon, very soon, the brighter bodies of planets and moons disappeared and the stars came into focus.

A long exhalation painted the porthole white for an instant, and Marvelous' knees finally gave under him. What started as coughing around a breath that caught in his throat stole over him and wrapped itself around him. He wept for a long time, quietly, in a cloud of his own breath.

The lights came up long after the cloud dissipated and he started, trembling as if he'd only just remembered he ought to feel cold. He pulled himself up with his good arm and made himself look around. His whole face felt hot and swollen, but he was otherwise numb. His hazy gaze passed dully over the wrecked walls and the intermittent spatters and streaks of blood he'd thoughtlessly left around. He had voided himself and had space for these things now.

He would clean – and repair – later. For the time being, he would crash on the sofa and wait and doze. So he thought. He lied there with his eyes closed, still wide awake, until Navi's signature mechanical flap wafted into the room. When he sat up he found her perched on the back of the chair at the center of the room, waiting.

“Morning, captain.”

The words carried him up and forward, but not because he believed them. That would come later. For now, he would settle in the big chair that wasn't his and plot their next moves. He could only do that, for now.

“Morning.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this as a gift to a friend, but I figured I ought to christen this account before I get cold feet. I've got something longer in the works, but I want to have a slight backlog of chapters to post before I start sharing it here. Thanks for reading!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Countless Stars, Light on Me (Podfic)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4273266) by [aquabluejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aquabluejay/pseuds/aquabluejay)




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